stray coffee roasters

Light roasts with the grower named

The bags carry producer names rather than blend names, and the roasting is deliberately light so each lot's own character survives it. stray has roasted in Munich since 2021, starting as an online bean business and opening the café in April 2023, once there was a roasting programme worth building a counter around.

The business was founded in November 2021 and spent about a year and a half selling beans before there was anywhere to drink them, which is the reverse of the order most cafés arrive at roasting in.

The house language is direct about the intent: radically transparent, relentlessly curious. In practice that means single lots and washing stations listed by name, from origins including Ethiopia, Kenya, Rwanda and Colombia, on a list that rotates as green coffee arrives and sells through.

A roastery with a café attached

Read the order of things correctly: this is a roasting business that added a bar, not a café that started roasting. The beans go out to other Munich cafés as well, Café Faber among them, so the roastery sits inside the city's specialty supply chain rather than serving only its own room.

That has a practical effect on a visit. What is on the espresso hopper is whatever the roastery is proudest of at that moment, and it rotates, so two visits a month apart will not give the same cup. The bar was named in the European Coffee Trip awards for 2025.

Order the double espresso

The double espresso is the clearest test of what this roastery does, and the drink to start with. Light roasting under pressure is unforgiving, which is precisely why it is worth ordering here: the acidity, the sweetness and the fruit have nowhere to hide behind roast character.

Ask which lot is on and what it is meant to taste like, since the staff work from producer names and processing details rather than from a fixed house description. Then buy a bag of something different from what you drank. The current releases turn over quickly and the retail side is half the business, so the shelf is as much the point as the bar.

The transparency the house advertises is meant to be used. The producer names and processing notes exist to be asked about rather than to sit unread on a bag.